Week 11 Beginning 27/4/09

This is really the final week of the project. On the thursday we had an all nighter session. But I did not stay all night. I felt that it would be more productive for me to go home and get some sleep as I knew I would not work after midnight. Instead, I made a list of tasks and bugs to fix and gave these jobs out before I left at 23:00. I left Dan in charge and told him when to build new release versions of the game. Everything went well and when I came back in the morning we only had 4 bugs left to fix. On the Friday, however, most people had left by 7:00 and gone to bed. Dan, Craig and Mark were the only ones left from my team there. But they left soon after, as they wanted sleep. They did a good job and they deserved it.

AGD Week 10 Beginning 20/4/09

We have had three weeks off this project to get work done for our other modules. Due to this we forgot where we were with the project and had an extremely slow week. Dave got an installer package version of the game working and Dan set up a bug tracking account with Fogbugz on its 45 day free trial. I made sure that each team member logged at least two bugs to Fogbugz and started a spreadsheet to keep tack of how many bugs we had in total. Other than that a slow week to get back into it all.

AGD Week 9 Beginning 23/3/09

This week was hand in week for the Alpha and everything went wrong. For this last week all we really needed was menus in the game. Craig was coding the menus and was doing a good job. But on Thursday both him and Dave went to Newcastle for a work placement interview at Eutechnyx. This meant that menus were not getting done. In the end I got hold of Craig to get his login details for his account on the Uni computers, but then could not find the work. At this time the main drive that students use on the network failed for half an hour and put us back even further.
On the day of the deadline, Craig was back and to get ahead with the menus again him, Dave and I took a menu each to program, basing them off Craig's menu framework. Unfortunately for me I spent several hours trying to get the end menu work for after a race and it just not seem to want to work. I was starting to panic about the work as at this time Mark had been locked out of our source control for some strange reason that we still don't know the reason for. That took an hour to fix and once that was done we had to sort out the updates of each of Dave's, Dan's and Craig's work. Once that was done I re-arranged the directory on our source control and branched the Alpha version of the game. This was submitted 45 minutes after the deadline. It was a real shame that we fell at the last hurdle, but unfortunately there was not much we could do about it.

Game Development Techniques

I finally got round to uploading the video of my Unreal Tournament Famous Five Total Conversion....


Edit: Third time is a charm I think. I have several other problems with thsi video.

AGD Week 8 Beginning 16/3/09

Well we our now into crunch time! With the Alpha deadline looming at the end of next week, we picked up the pace again after last weeks slow week. I took on the job at trying to implement states into the game. But, this proved a little problematic as we could not use everything from our framework in the states and passing them in did not work either. So Lead Programmer Dan took this off me as he had a better understanding of the framework it would be best he managed the states and got them set up. Instead this week I implemented an Input handler. I was supposed to do this back in week 2 but then deemed it unnecessary at the time, but since then I have re-thought this and decided it was necessary. This took some time as I had to implement any action or test that can be carried out on the controller, but by implementing this handler it takes away some of the traversing to get to the right section of the game pad that is needed at that point; making the rest of the programmers jobs a little bit easier.

We are getting more and more models from the artists and Tom, who made the team USA ship, has made us a little splash screen video that we can use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8idV4XLcn4

I am hoping that we have a complete demo ready for the alpha. Most bugs are being left in at this stage as it is not important and we can get rid of the bugs after this deadline.

AGD Week 7 Beginning 9/3/09

This past week has been a very slow week. At the beginning of the week 3 of my team including myself had an interview at Monumental Studios in Nottingham. This got us a little lost as to what we were doing this week. Apart from doing a little debugging and working with the artists.

We sorted out the shading problem with the map track. Before hand the shadows that were being exported with the map were large polygonal shadows and had large lines going in one direction. At the export stage from 3DS Max, the wrong type of shadows to be exported with the model were selected. But now that they had been changed to the new smooth shadows, Gamebryo automatically creates new shaders to render the map properly but this then causes memory leaks and makes the game crash when closing due to the shades being deleted after the renderer has ben deleted; which it needs to complete the deletion of the shaders. At the moment this is not important to get an Alpha game ready for Friday in week 9 and can be sorted out after that point.

Before getting the new map in I also had to get rid of 1128 memory leaks. The debugger says that its to do with strings but it tuned out to b with every mesh that is created using the game base object. For som reason Gamebryo does not like you just deleting them so you have to just set them to NULL. This is due to the mesh having more than one pointer pointing to it so by setting it to null it can be deleted when the program closes.

AGD Week 6 Beginning 2/3/09

This week I planned for the group to complete a game mode; Time Trial. We were also trying to get this ready for a visit from Frontier Developments. This did not happen as the people coming from Frontier were called into an urgent meeting and were not able to visit at all. Instead the visit was taken over by the lecturers from the both the programming and art gaming courses at the uni and also by some of the final year students. We presented how far we were with the game so far, and what was planned for the future. They seemed impressed with what we had created, but we still have a long way to go. We have 3 weeks before Easter and I am hoping we can get both mandatory game modes finished with a very simple GUI system in too.

This week I just got a very basic HUD working that displayed the fuel level, current speed and current lap. This was a small job but something that needed to be done for the presentation on the Wednesday. This was then taken over by Craig so that he could display the timer that he had created, which shows overall time and time for 3 laps.

On the programming side I think we are starting to slow down again like we did at the beginning of the semester. We really need to speed back up to meet our next deadline at the end of week 9. On the art side we got our track and a couple of new vehicles. The vehicles a split into countries the first vehicle that we got was for Britain, the one at the top of this article is for the USSR and the one below is for the USA. We are just waiting on our last vehicle for Japan. The second piece of concept art that was created for us a few weeks ago of tracks was inspiration for the track that we currently have in game, and it looks amazing! We are having problems with the lighting, but that can be left until the debug and testing time after week 9.